Since I’m planning a trip to Florida this summer, I thought it’d be a perfect time to tell you about sharks and how horrible (and awesome) they are.

There are a lot of shark experts walking around thanks to The Discovery Channel and Shark Week, but Shark Week seems to recycle the same five or six facts each year and sticks them between dramatic re-enactments of people being eaten.

“Sharks only attack people because they confuse you with their regular pray,” they say. Then they show you bloody footage of people being pulled underwater.

“Remember, they’re more afraid of you than you are of them!”

Well, I’m here to tell you something. Sharks do eat people. It’s true humans are not on the menu and that most attacks occur because of mistaken identity, but you’re kidding yourself if you think we’ve never cut open a shark only to find human remains spilling out.

Sharks can grow their teeth forever, basically — approximately 35,000 teeth in a lifetime and some species begin using them in utero — devouring their brothers and sisters for nutrients and ensuring that only the strongest survive the birthing process.

A shark is a born killer, so finely honed by evolution that it has hardly changed in 450 million years. Have you ever read the poem “The Tiger” by William Blake? He questions how God could create such a fearsome beast.

“What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?” Blake asked. “Did he who made the lamb make thee?”

Good question. That’s what I want to know about sharks. Who designed a creature straight out of our nightmares — a swimming mouth, which strikes from stealth to devour?

These are the things I’ll be thinking about when I watch my kids splash into the ocean for the first time.

Maybe that’s why humans have found it so easy to kill at least 100 million of the animals each year, maybe more. It’s said 73 million sharks are killed for shark finning alone, which may make the number somewhere closer to 273 million.

By contrast, there are an average 75 shark attacks worldwide — very few of them fatal.

The odds are in your favor when you get in the ocean. I have to remind myself of that. Listening to me, you might think I despise sharks — I don’t. Sharks are easily my favorite animal. I’d jump into a cage with great whites, if I could. I’d swim in the open ocean with black tip reef sharks.

But part of that allure is the fear. It’s a question I have to ponder when I let my kids in the ocean. On my last trip to Pensacola, while standing on a pier watching dolphins teach their young how to steal bait from the fishermen, I saw two sharks. One splashed to the surface briefly — a reef shark, I suspect — before disappearing.

The incident was less than 50 yards from the beach, where hundreds of vacationers swam unaware in the waves. The second shark I saw was on that same pier. A fisherman hooked a 2-foot-long bonnet head. That was the closest I had ever knowingly been to a wild shark.

I heard a rumor of one other shark before I left. On my way to the car, after a day on the beach, I overheard the lifeguards talking about one seen during a training regime earlier in the day.

One of them asked the other if he had seen it and then relayed the story of how he and the trainees had attempted to shoo the shark away from the people swimming closer to the shore.